The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

James Gleick

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Information history in 1948 whole source
reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning. —Claude…
Bell System hires mathematician George Campbell whole source
ate substrate of meaning, perhaps best left to philosophers. The Bell System had none of those, but the company had hired its first mathemat…
Information history in 1943 whole source
onsciousness to ‘jump over its own shadow,’ to leave behind the given, to represent the transcendent, yet, as is self-evident, only in symbo…
Information history in 1090 whole source
f the cosmos, however it is figured, is ten raised to a very large power,”♦ according to Wheeler. According to Seth Lloyd: “No more than 101…
Information history in 1730 whole source
h the bugle and the bell, used to transmit a small set of messages: attack; retreat; come to church. But they could not conceive of talking…
Information history in 1908 whole source
fulfilled in turn, flame after flame,” she boasts, “along the course ordained.” A German historian, Richard Hennig, traced and measured the…
Information history in 1841 whole source
By the time Captain Allen discovered the talking drums in 1841, Samuel F. B. Morse was struggling with his own percussive code, the electrom…
Information history in 1840 whole source
set about creating this dictionary himself, wasting many hours inscribing it on large folios.♦♦ He claimed the idea in his first telegraph p…
Information history in 1914 whole source
en in the modern world, lacked an alphabet. The drums metamorphosed speech. It fell to John F. Carrington to explain. An English missionary,…
Information history in 1954 whole source
ums less and less, schoolboys who did not even learn their own drum names.♦ He regretted it. He had made the talking drums a part of his own…
Information history in 2004 whole source
d the poet sing of his great deeds abroad because, once sung, they were no longer his alone. They belonged to anyone who heard the song. —Wa…
Information history in 1500 whole source
tablets and stone, descend from the same original ancestor, which arose near the eastern littoral of the Mediterranean Sea, sometime not muc…
Information history in 1750 whole source
ifferent ways, could denote numbers and weights. A more systematic approach to the writing of numbers did not take shape until the time of H…
Information history in 1963 whole source
e that existed before in Mesopotamia. “It was assumed that the Babylonians had had some sort of number mysticism or numerology,” wrote Asger…
Information history in 1949 whole source
th-century historian of ancient mathematics, had to reassemble tablets whose fragments had made their way to opposite sides of the Atlantic…
Information history in 1972 whole source
e compared with restoring the history of mathematics from a few torn pages which have accidentally survived the destruction of a great libra…
Information history in 1667 whole source
ters) In such busie, and active times, there arise more new thoughts of men, which must be signifi’d, and varied by new expressions. —Thomas…
Information history in 1604 whole source
new thoughts of men, which must be signifi’d, and varied by new expressions. —Thomas Sprat (1667)♦ A VILLAGE SCHOOLMASTER AND PRIEST made a…
Information history in 1591 whole source
ar predetermined form of letters. The word cony (rabbit) appeared variously as conny, conye, conie, connie, coni, cuny, cunny, and cunnie in…
Information history in 1286 whole source
ith cu then looke toward the end of that letter. And so of all the rest. &c. It was not easy to explain. Friar Johannes Balbus of Genoa trie…
Information history in 1613 whole source
on any one item in a list of a thousand or a million, unerringly, with perfect confidence. And without knowing anything about the meaning. N…
Information history in 1587 whole source
e numbers. Meaning comes into the dictionary in its definitions, of course. Cawdrey’s crucial models were dictionaries for translation, espe…
Information history in 1611 whole source
did.♦ He was doctor of physic; he lived for some time in Chichester; his dates of birth and death are uncertain; he is said to have visited…
Information history in 1616 whole source
re uncertain; he is said to have visited London in 1611 and there to have seen a dead crocodile; and little else is known. His Expositour ap…
Information history in 1656 whole source
seen a dead crocodile; and little else is known. His Expositour appeared in 1616 and went through several editions in the succeeding decades…
Information history in 1979 whole source
OED. Nonce-word, in fact, was coined by James Murray himself. He got it in. An American psychologist, Sondra Smalley, coined the word codepe…
Information history in 1989 whole source
roughout its history”♦ is meant to be included. So for mackerel (“a well-known sea-fish, Scomber scombrus, much used for food”) the second e…
Information history in 2002 whole source
the second edition in 1989 listed nineteen alternative spellings. The unearthing of sources never ends, though, so the third edition revised…
Information history in 1600 whole source
book, making no pretense to completeness, contained a vocabulary of only 2,500. We possess now a more complete dictionary of English as it w…
Information history in 2007 whole source
e growth comes from mitosis. The guitar divides into the electric and the acoustic; other words divide in reflection of delicate nuances (as…
Information history in 1832 whole source
ted from the refuse of fish; fire has been sifted by the lamp of Davy; and machinery has been taught arithmetic instead of poetry. —Charles…
Information history in 1871 whole source
which remained out of focus for a long time. What did he hope to achieve? For that matter, what, exactly, was his vocation? On his death in…
Parliament funds Babbage's Difference Engine whole source
c-industrial project “at the expense of the nation, to be held as national property,”♦ financed by the Treasury for almost twenty years, beg…
Information history in 1767 whole source
ad hoc computation. “Computers” and “calculators” existed: they were people with special skills, and all in all, computing was costly. Begin…
Information history in 1614 whole source
s and Divisions in Arithmetike are avoided, and performed onely by Addition in stead of Multiplication, and by Subtraction in stead of Divis…
Information history in 1627 whole source
weighed. Even this exciting discovery took several years to travel as far as Johannes Kepler, who employed it in perfecting his celestial ta…
Blaise Pascal builds his adding machine whole source
calculating devices worthy of the name machine, for adding and—through repetition of the adding—multiplying. Blaise Pascal made an adding ma…
Information history in 1792 whole source
to check one against another. When they did, they found unexpected flaws. For example, Taylor’s Logarithms, the standard quarto printed in L…
Information history in 1820 whole source
ed. “Multitudes of contrivances were designed, and almost endless drawings made, for the purpose of economizing the time,” Babbage wrote rue…
Information history in 1822 whole source
zing the time,” Babbage wrote ruefully. By 1820 he had settled on a design. He acquired his own lathe, used it himself and hired metalworker…
Information history in 1827 whole source
ly too much to assert that he believes nothing he hears, and only half of what he sees,”♦ Babbage wrote his friend Herschel. When his father…
Information history in 1826 whole source
cal form of a machine but its more elusive properties: its timing and its logic. It was an extraordinary ambition, as Babbage himself apprec…
Information history in 1860 whole source
potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.”♦ They no longer saw the point. CHARLES B…
Information history in 1843 whole source
the basis of her own knowledge. She did that on her own, without telling either Menabrea or Babbage. When she finally did show Babbage her d…
In retrospect one can assert, “From 1870 to 1970 the history whole source
perations mathematically certain through its power of correcting its possible errors?”♦ Ralph Waldo Emerson had met Babbage in London and de…
Information history in 1851 whole source
ossible that the stretched wire might itself be available for a species of telegraphic communication yet more rapid.” During the Great Exhib…
Information history in 1846 whole source
orne (1851)♦ THREE CLERKS IN A SMALL ROOM UPSTAIRS in the Ferry House of Jersey City handled the entire telegraph traffic of the city of New…
Information history in 1849 whole source
e the Bank of England, and advertised its presence by installing an electric clock—modern and apt, for already railroad time was telegraphic…
Information history in 1793 whole source
ous method to write in the air, using a small number of symbols, simply formed from straight line segments,”♦ reported one of them, Gilbert…
Information history in 1799 whole source
H Construction began on stations in branches extending east to Strasbourg, west to Brest, and south to Lyon. When Napoleon Bonaparte seized…
Information history in 1794 whole source
forgotten, but they were a sensation in their time. In London, a Drury Lane entertainer and songwriter named Charles Dibdin put the inventio…
Information history in 1774 whole source
bet, employing letters as an intermediate layer. This seemed so natural as to be not worth remarking. Telegraph meant “far writing,” after a…
Information history in 1787 whole source
that can be as easily attracted, and are, at the same time, easily visible.”♦ That was too many wires to be practicable. A Frenchman named L…
Information history in 1809 whole source
rections. “It appears that he has formed an alphabet of motions,” reported a witness, but apparently only Lomond’s wife could understand the…
Information history in 1844 whole source
elf, a relay might reverse the signal. And relays might combine signals from more than one source. But that was for later. The turning point…
Information history in 1845 whole source
it was far from clear who, besides the police and the occasional chess player, would line up to pay the tariff. In Washington, where pricing…
UK establishes the Meteorological Office whole source
This was a transformative idea. In 1854 the government established a Meteorological Office in the Board of Trade. The department’s chief, Ad…
Information history in 1847 whole source
with wax, the whole affair seemed public and insecure—the messages passing along those mysterious conduits, the electric wires. Vail himself…
Information history in 1885 whole source
say, four messages of five words each and bundle them into a fixed-price telegram of twenty words. The code books got bigger and they got sm…
Information history in 1887 whole source
ese—these cleverly encoded messages could be disrupted by a mistake in a single character. By a single dot, for that matter. For example, on…
Information history in 1641 whole source
w a Man may with the greatest Swiftness and Speed, discover his Intentions to one that is far distant from him.”♦ By swiftness and speed he…
Information history in 1868 whole source
ges to his readers a series of substitution ciphers. Along with Poe, Jules Verne and Honoré de Balzac also introduced ciphers into their fic…
Information history in 1873 whole source
a tool for thinking, before the thinker uses it as a signal for communicating his thought,”♦ asserted an essayist in Harper’s New Monthly Ma…
Information history in 1878 whole source
es at the ends of the wire, and the two gossips at the ends of the telephones—may be very fascinating to a mere mathematician. —James Clerk…
Information history in 1874 whole source
al fortunes though it was not a particularly glamorous technology amid the excitement of what was already called the Age of Electricity. Beg…
Information history in 1895 whole source
aced metal staples with insulated fasteners. They attached dry batteries and speaking tubes and added spare wire to bridge the gaps. In the…
As always in Jewish history (1937) whole source
is.) “A calculus is developed for manipulating these equations by simple mathematical processes”—with this clarion call, Shannon began his t…
Information history in 1939 whole source
plex, original, and quite detached from anything people in the field were doing.♦♦ He never bothered to publish it. Meanwhile, late in the w…
Russell and Whitehead publish Principia Mathematica whole source
was the goal of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, the giants of English rationalism, who published their great work in three volu…
Information history in 1906 whole source
eating-its-tail feedback loop that seemed to turn on the possibility of self-contradiction. This was his firewall. Enter Kurt Gödel. He was…
Information history in 1930 whole source
e system, as opposed to the book. In PM, mathematics had been contained—a ship in a bottle, no longer buffeted and turned by the vast unruly…
Godel publishes his incompleteness paper whole source
5, it is divisible by 121, and (when decoded according to the official rules) it is a provable formula. Gödel laid all this out in a little…
Information history in 1933 whole source
n a very interesting manner,” he wrote. “In contradistinction Wittgenstein … advances a completely trivial and uninteresting misinterpretati…
Information history in 1938 whole source
fered depressive breakdowns and bouts of hypochondria that forced him into sanatoria. Princeton beckoned but Gödel vacillated. He stayed in…
Information history in 1880 whole source
ments came from those who focused on the exponential power of interconnection. Scientific American assessed “The Future of the Telephone” as…
Information history in 1890 whole source
n is concerned, as the various members of the body now are by the nervous system.♦ The scattered members using telephones numbered half a mi…
Information history in 1925 whole source
eds.”♦ To make the connections, the switchboard had grown to a monster of 2 million soldered parts, 4,000 miles of wire, and 15,000 signal l…
Information history in 1941 whole source
en theory and practice—the clashing cultures. “For the mathematician, an argument is either perfect in every detail or else it is wrong,” he…
Information history in 1940 whole source
e population genetics community.…[Shannon] discovered principles that were rediscovered later.… My regret is that [it] did not become widely…
Information history in 1986 whole source
r you can start in the west, with trying to understand what information is, and then head east. One hopes that these tracks will meet. —Jon…
As always in Jewish history (1936) whole source
ing here. Turing was a fellow and a recent graduate at King’s College, Cambridge, when he presented his computable-numbers paper to his prof…
Shannon completes classified cryptography report whole source
ted, “a secrecy system is almost identical with a noisy communication system.”♦ (He completed his report, “A Mathematical Theory of Cryptogr…
Information history in 1921 whole source
ds. The linguist Edward Sapir wrote of “symbolic atoms” formed by a language’s underlying phonetic patterns. “The mere sounds of speech,” he…
Information history in 1013 whole source
Communication appeared, Shannon took a pencil and a piece of notebook paper, drew a line from top to bottom, and wrote the powers of ten fro…
Information history in 1011 whole source
nal (Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers) and to 1 billion the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He estimated one hour of broadcast tele…
Information history in 1950 whole source
this theory of information in fields for which it was not designed, but I think the danger will not keep people from using it. —J. C. R. Lic…
Information history in 1919 whole source
neat little packets, that measure, as it were, just three inches each way.”♦ On his return to the United States, Wiener joined the faculty o…
Information history in 1828 whole source
mming.” The idea is an old one, Turing says, and he cites Charles Babbage, whom he identifies as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambri…
Information history in 1839 whole source
The idea is an old one, Turing says, and he cites Charles Babbage, whom he identifies as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge from…
Information history in 1951 whole source
Many more subtle kinds of experiments were suddenly fair game, some of them directly suggested by Shannon’s work on noise and redundancy. A…
Information history in 1958 whole source
ame invisible. Donald Broadbent, an English experimental psychologist exploring issues of attention and short-term memory, wrote of one expe…
Information history in 1956 whole source
climbing aboard the bandwagon of information theory, some mathematicians and engineers were uncomfortable. Shannon himself called it a bandw…
Information history in 1953 whole source
n house.” He urged more research and less exposition. As for cybernetics, the word began to fade. The Macy cyberneticians held their last me…
Clausius coins the term entropy whole source
ame given to one of the quantitative elements which determine the thermodynamic condition of a portion of matter. Rudolf Clausius coined the…
Information history in 1862 whole source
vin, imprinted the second law on the popular imagination by reveling in its bleakness: “Although mechanical energy is indestructible,” he de…
Information history in 1903 whole source
would become, nor how long-lived. Henry Adams, who wanted to work some version of entropy into his theory of history, wrote to his brother B…
Information history in 1929 whole source
perating a piston in a cylinder of fluid. He pointed out that this device would need, in effect, “a sort of memory faculty.” (Alan Turing wa…
Information history in 1875 whole source
e of protoplasm. “The biologist must be allowed as much scientific use of the imagination as the physicist,” The Popular Science Monthly exp…
Information history in 1971 whole source
m is already written in the egg,”♦ said Sydney Brenner to Horace Freeland Judson, molecular biology’s great chronicler, at Cambridge in the…
Information history in 1977 whole source
something carried in DNA? Is it properly pinned down as a material thing at all? Not everyone agreed there was a problem. Gunther Stent decl…
Information history in 1957 whole source
ids.” It was Seymour Benzer, said Stent, who established that definitively. Yet Benzer himself had not been quite so sanguine. He argued as…
Information history in 1976 whole source
iewed from the proper perspective. From that perspective, genes are the focus, the sine qua non, the star of the show. In his first book—pub…
Information history in 1983 whole source
memes, I often find myself picturing an ephemeral flickering pattern of sparks leaping from brain to brain, screaming “Me, me!” —Douglas Hof…
In retrospect one can assert, “From 1870 to 1970 the history whole source
UGH THE VERY UNIVERSALITY of its structures, starting with the code, the biosphere looks like the product of a unique event,”♦ Jacques Monod…
Information history in 1981 whole source
first to use the terms viral text and viral sentences seems to have been a reader of Dawkins named Stephen Walton of New York City, correspo…
Information history in 1984 whole source
ritual circumcision. Memes were seen through car windows when yellow diamond-shaped BABY ON BOARD signs appeared as if in an instant of mass…
Information history in 2005 whole source
(In a State of Sin) “I wonder,” she said. “It’s getting harder to see the patterns, don’t you think?” —Michael Cunningham (2005)♦ IN 1958, G…
Information history in 1965 whole source
paper “On Computable Numbers,” but of course the real focus was on uncomputable numbers. Could uncomputable numbers and random numbers be re…
Information history in 1966 whole source
heard rumors of similar work coming from the Soviet Union. Sure enough, the first issue of a new journal arrived (after a journey of months)…
Information history in 1729 whole source
t exactly once. What would be an uninteresting number? Presumably a random number. The English number theorist G. H. Hardy randomly rode in…
Information history in 1978 whole source
was snowing, and he was fearful for his health. Chaitin never did meet him. Gödel, increasingly unstable, afraid of poisoning, died in the w…
Information history in 1964 whole source
nable a machine to do that? In other words, could a computer be made to learn from experience? He worked out an elaborate answer and publish…
Edison invents the phonograph whole source
have been vinyl, but in this case it was copper, plated with gold. This analog means of capturing, preserving, and reproducing sound was inv…
Information history in 2006 whole source
different forms they take are determined by information. To do anything requires energy. To specify what is done requires information. —Seth…
Information history in 1915 whole source
not seemed to involve information at all. Black holes were the brainchild of Einstein, though he did not live to know about them. He establi…
Information history in 1961 whole source
tablet or a hole in a punched card or a particle with spin up or down, he insisted that it could not exist without some embodiment. Landauer…
Information history in 1988 whole source
hester is a light-sealed device called Aunt Martha (short for Aunt Martha’s coffin). Bennett and his research assistant John Smolin jury-rig…
Information history in 2003 whole source
able definition of reality could be expected to permit this.” He gave it the indelible name spukhafte Fernwirkung, “spooky action at a dista…
Bennett presents quantum teleportation publicly whole source
y entangled (“verschränkt,” as Schrödinger said). Bennett put entanglement to work in quantum teleportation, presented publicly for the firs…
Information history in 2001 whole source
antum generalization of classical information has led to a cleaner and more powerful theory, both of computing and communication.” Shannon l…
Information history in 1987 whole source
e person, he was the progenitor of the information age. Cyberspace is in part his creation; he never knew it, though he told his last interv…
Information history in 2009 whole source
he desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. —Hilary…
Information history in 1917 whole source
many towers of Babel. Long before Wikipedia, Borges also wrote about the encyclopedia “fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopedia (Ne…
Information history in 2008 whole source
ms came from forty-five countries, paying their own way, toting laptops, exchanging tradecraft, wearing their fervor on their T-shirts. By t…
Information history in 1980 whole source
bing the routes, intersections, and histories of every numbered highway and road in the United States. (“Route 273 [New York State, decommis…
Information history in 1790 whole source
nothing like All Knowledge. For encyclopedias, information tends to come in the form of topics and categories. Britannica framed its organiz…
Information history in 1982 whole source
emory, and the larger Model 165, with a full megabyte, in a large cabinet. One of these room-filling mainframes could be purchased for $4,67…
Information history in 1962 whole source
aid, as if for the first time, that a burden had been placed on human communication: new complexity, new detachment, and a frightening new e…
Information history in 2000 whole source
(The Return of Meaning) It was inevitable that meaning would force its way back in. —Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2000)♦ THE EXHAUSTION, the surfeit,…
Information history in 1928 whole source
ir special destiny, after their egos had been bruised by Darwinism. “It becomes absolutely necessary,” wrote the French philosopher Édouard…
Information history in 2010 whole source
h an honorable history. I barely twitter myself, but even this odd medium, microblogging so quirky and confined, has its uses and its enchan…
Information history in 1969 whole source
an, 92. ♦ “THE LARGER THE NUMBER OF SENSES INVOLVED”: Jonathan Miller, Marshall McLuhan, 3. ♦ “ACOUSTIC SPACE IS ORGANIC”: Playboy interview…
Information history in 1651 whole source
240. ♦ “MEN LIVED UPON GROSS EXPERIENCE”: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall, and C…
Information history in 1886 whole source
as Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall, and Civill, (1651; repr., London: George Routledge…
Information history in 1944 whole source
Die Philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, vol. 7 (Berlin: Olms, 1890), 12, quoted by Kurt Gödel in “Russell’s Mathematica…
Information history in 1881 whole source
lectric Telegraph. ♦ COUNT MIOT DE MELITO CLAIMED: Memoirs of Count Miot de Melito, vol. 1, trans. Cashel Hoey and John Lillie (London: Samp…
Information history in 1995 whole source
♦ MEANWHILE THE CHAPPES MANAGED: Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks (Washington, D.C.: IEEE Computer S…
Information history in 1997 whole source
♦ THE MONTANA EAST LINE TELEPHONE ASSOCIATION: David B. Sicilia, “How the West Was Wired,” Inc., 15 June 1997. ♦ “THE GOLD-BUG”: 1843; Compl…
Information history in 1990 whole source
♦ IN THE WANING YEARS OF TSARIST RUSSIA: Obituary, Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society 22 (1990): 31; A. N. Shiryaev, “Kolmogorov: L…
Information history in 1893 whole source
g the entries on angioplasty and Sigmund Freud. ♦ “IT HAS NEVER BEEN SPREAD OUT, YET”: Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (London: Ma…
Information history in 1975 whole source
amics of ‘Small-World’ Networks,” 442. ♦ “WE WANT THE DEMON, YOU SEE”: Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad, trans. Michael Kandel (London: Secker &…
Information history in 1740 whole source
of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Gitelman, Lisa, and Geoffrey B. Pingree, eds. Ne…
Information history in 1926 whole source
Krutch, Joseph Wood. Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius. New York: Knopf, 1926. Kubát, Libor, and Jirí Zeman. Entropy and Information in Sci…
Information history in 1859 whole source
Philological Society. Proposal for a Publication of a New English Dictionary by the Philological Society. London: Trübner & Co., 1859. Picke…
Information history in 1833 whole source
ish Dictionary by the Philological Society. London: Trübner & Co., 1859. Pickering, John. A Lecture on Telegraphic Language. Boston: Hilliar…
Information history in 1999 whole source
no. 4 (1964): 301–10. Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Human Phenomenon. Translated by Sarah Appleton-Weber. Brighton, U.K.: Sussex Academic…
Information history in 1974 whole source
Hulton Archive/Getty Images 8.3 Alfred Eisenstaedt/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images 9.1 Taken from Entropy and Energy Levels by Gasser & Ri…